


But not getting better together

by thought, toomanyhometowns



Series: I went to space and all I got was... [4]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, more social media as coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 17:49:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12822825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought, https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanyhometowns/pseuds/toomanyhometowns
Summary: Theoretically, they're all going to move on at some point. Really. It's definitely going to happen.OrDoug goes to Comicon. Minkowski buys some puppies to cope. Maxwell is doing just fine, why are you asking?





	But not getting better together

**Author's Note:**

> With many many thanks to Toomanyhometowns/SK, who provided the idea that sparked this whole fic, plotted out large chunks of it with me, and came up with a variety of fun and exciting ways to make Eiffel suffer. Really, whenever you feel bad for Doug SK either came up with the idea or just flat out wrote the lines. She also read this over at some ridiculous hour last night, allowing me to maintain the momentum of writing over half of this on a caffeine high yesterday evening.  
> Title from 17th Street Treatment Centre, by John K. Samson

Hera has been reading up on psychology. Specifically post-traumatic stress, though Doug's pretty sure she's trying to be subtle about that part. And hey, he's not actually stupid, contrary to what everybody thinks. He knows that none of them are exactly emotionally healthy, and he's also pretty sure that piling into a single house and pulling the proverbial blanket over their heads isn't a great long-term strategy. He's just not really sure what alternatives they have, given their situation.

The way Goddard hasn't found them is a pink elephant of record-breaking size, and the longer nobody addresses it the more paranoid Doug gets. He'd spent a solid eight months quietly convinced that Maxwell and Jacobi were reporting back to Kepler about everything that was happening, but Hera promises if they are it isn't anywhere she can see them do it, and if he's being honest Doug is far more inclined to trust them after he and Jacobi and the night of really stupid decisions and active self-sabotage that is never to be spoken about again.

He and Jacobi have... an understanding, now. There are enough similarities in their experiences that the catharsis was kind of nice, and enough differences that it's never going to happen again. Jacobi might see alcohol as an easy coping mechanism, but he's never spent two days lying on the bathroom floor drenched in sweat and tears and his own vomit because he was going to show up sober to the custody hearing or die trying. Doug's dad may have been an emotional yoyo, but he never laid a hand on Doug unless it was an overly-exuberant and sloppy arm around the shoulders, eager to show his son off once he had a few drinks in him in a way he never was sober. So. Whatever. They bonded, it was a thing, it was a bad night all around and if waking up hungover to Minkowski's 'not angry just disappointed' stare isn't a deterrent from future poor life choices he doesn't know what is.

Anyway. The past 15 months have felt like one long game of hurry-up-and-wait, with the final result being their violent and inescapable deaths. And that's not even counting Lovelace's crusade of destruction. She's definitely killed a small forest by now. The living room is mostly taken up with file boxes and legal textbooks and a hard metal container holding one of the many back-ups of all the electronic information she's put together. Doug has not met 'our close personal friends the unemployed and desperate lawyers', nor has he met 'our good buddy from Interpol', but he's sure they're really nice people.

Really, not a lot has changed from their time in space. There's just less chance of death by critical malfunction or alien involvement. But the general sense of impending doom, the close-quarters forced intimacy with people he's still not sure about trusting, the lack of anything to do with his time. At least Hera's still here, too. He's not really sure what he would have done if they hadn't been able to get her back online. Those first couple months had been bad for all of them, but Doug doesn't think any of them felt Hera's absence as strongly as he had. She hadn't been there for the month and a half in the shuttle, either -- they barely had enough power to keep them all alive, running a full-fledged AI intended for space station operation was out of the question -- but the shuttle had felt like a different world. Doug remembers most of it like an extended anxiety attack, remembers waking from fitful sleep and not being able to scream when he thought he saw his fingernails falling off because Minkowski was awake and keeping guard three feet away and Maxwell was asleep just behind him and she'd judge.

Jacobi spent most of the trip sitting with his back against Kepler's cryopod. Hilbert and Lovelace and Hera had agreed, before they left, that the safest thing would be to delete to codes needed to wake him up. Doug still kind of feels sick about that. He was a human being, even if an incredibly shitty one, and what if something went wrong? Or Goddard couldn't figure out how to get him out?

"The alternative was killing him," Maxwell had told him, early on in the trip. "You do understand that. They were being kind."

She'd put on a good show of not caring about Kepler, perhaps to balance out how Jacobi looked permanently like his heart was breaking. But Doug had caught her, once, trying to hack into the pod's systems.

"I just need to know the option is there," she'd said when he confronted her, and it's the most desperately lost he's ever seen her. The moment of vulnerability had lasted maybe ten seconds. 

Minkowski had remained remarkably, reliably steady throughout the whole thing. Lovelace had been just as steady and stable until she hadn't been. Doug supposes she's got a few traumatic memories about being stuck in a tiny shuttle in the middle of the uncaring void of space, too. Honestly, by the second week on the shuttle Doug's pretty sure he would have rather his first shuttle experience involved a quick death and a pseudo-triumphant return as an alien lifeform. Space is... really big. Really. Big.

Lovelace's freak-out had been silent and very private and they all gave her as much privacy as it was physically possible to offer. She had spent a lot of time staring out the viewscreen at space, or examining her hands like she'd never seen them before. It was probably good there were no mirrors on the shuttle.

Hilbert had given Doug a lot of sedatives that month. Doug had taken them because honestly he was pretty sure they were all going to burn up in space long before they reached Earth and he really had nothing left to lose. Minkowski, Jacobi and Maxwell had faithfully done their zero-gravity exercises every few hours, and after a few days Minkowski forced Doug and Hilbert to participate as well. Doug's pretty sure he had passed out a few times during, but hey, when they'd actually made it back to solid ground everybody could stand up and move around without difficulty, so probably it had been worth it.

Anyway. Doug's maybe getting a bit off track. It happens, sometimes. Getting sneak attacked by memories. Hera's probably read something about that, too.

They've all talked about moving on, moving out of Minkowski's house. Making a fresh start. Nobody's made any moves to actually do so, and any mention of it has remained nebulous, vague and occurring in some distant future that they've all silently agreed isn't coming any time soon. Minkowski had gone on vacation earlier that summer. She'd come back with a few carefully posed photos on a beach, some bland descriptions of the totally fun and relaxing time she had definitely had, and nobody had ever brought it up again. Doug had tried asking Dom during one of their shopping trips, but he hadn't given anything more illuminating than Minkowski had offered.

Hilbert is in a perpetual state of preparing to leave. Doug would be pretty ok with this if he wasn't also in a perpetual state of monitoring Doug's continued health and wellbeing as it relates to the creepy unwanted death virus he now unwillingly shares his body with.

Originally Doug had figured Maxwell and Jacobi would be the first to go, but now they've imprinted on Lovelace or whatever, and Lovelace has her thing with Minkowski and Koudelka which is kind of like thinking of your parents having sex. And hey, the house is already set up for Hera, and Maxwell's close by if anything goes wrong, and Doug's not going anywhere without Hera. Which brings them all back around to the mystical sometime future when they move on. Or die.

He's not expecting Hera to betray him. She thinks she's doing the right thing, of course, given her shaky grasp of human mental health. Maybe she is. Doug's no expert.

"You were always talking about how much you wanted to go to Comicon," she says, printing out the ticket proudly. "Do you know how hard it is to get tickets this close to the weekend? I booked your flight and hotel, too."

"Print those out for me please," Minkowski says to Hera, then, to Doug, "I think it's a great idea. You'll have a good time."

"I, uh... wow. That's... really soon! And really... far away!"

"It's only a few days," Hera says. "And you'll be too busy to miss anyone."

"Will I still be able to talk to you?" Doug asks, and he doesn't even care that it comes out a little pathetic. "I mean, on my phone or whatever. You're basically Skynet now, right, distance shouldn't be a barrier?"

"Of course," Hera says, fast. "Of course you can still talk to me. It'll be just like you're out at the shops."

And honestly? That's enough to calm Doug down for the three weeks leading up to his trip. Minkowski reminds him of his mom the first time he went to summer camp.

"Do you have a safe place for your passport?"

"My super fake passport, you mean? Yes, it's getting its own zipper compartment."

"And you know how you're getting from the airport to the hotel once you get there? A cab's going to be ridiculously expensive, I'll google shuttle or bus service."

"I already did, don't worry, Commander."

"Eiffel, do not make any jokes while you're going through customs. Don't even think about anything amusing. They will *not* appreciate it."

"It's like you have no faith in me at all."

Jacobi thinks Doug is going to get himself killed just so he can go "hang out in a hotel with a bunch of nerds", a sentiment that Hilbert echoes with bigger words and a variety of dramatic gesturing. Doug refuses to let them bring him down. He's gonna go, he's gonna have a great time. He's going to be in contact with Hera the entire weekend. It’ll be fine.

It is not fine.

Doug gets on the plane with his carry-on and his phone and the box of granola bars Minkowski had shoved at him just before he'd gone through security. It's noisier than he was expecting, and kind of smells weird, and the seats are super cramped. It's the second plane ride of his life, which he neglects to mention to anyone because it's a sharp reminder of how he was the only one who didn't make it onto the Hephaestus mission by virtue of his skills. Just a convenient body. Besides, given how much time they've all spent in space on actual space ships, how often he has or has not been on airplanes seems kind of irrelevant.

The first plane ride he'd taken had been from Texas to Florida in a private Goddard jet. Commercial air travel is... a little different. Smaller seats. More people. A very official sounding request to turn off the receiving and transmitting functions on all of his devices.

So! There's that. "Hera," he mutters into his phone, "That's not a real issue, is it?"

"Hang on," she says, and then "Yep. Uhh, the data clearly indicates that not only were some events judged as having a critical effect on a system, but they also happened during critical states of flight, specifically landings and take-offs. I can keep reading--"

"Nope, nope, that's all I needed to know." He glances down at the printout of his itinerary. The first flight is only an hour and forty minutes. He can absolutely go without Hera for that long. Not like the last time he flew away from everyone he knows he was frozen or anything. He's ignoring the much larger number further down the list. London is a long way away from San Diego. There's an ocean in the way.

The captain comes over the intercom to tell them that the departure is delayed a little bit, but the flight attendants keep coming up and down the aisle reminding people to turn off their phones. Mostly they're delivering the message in French, which he legitimately doesn't understand a word of. Maybe, he thinks, he can pretend not to have heard the official warning, and... Well, it's not his fault if the flight attendants expect everyone to speak French. This hope lasts about twenty seconds, because then someone starts speaking German, which begins to chip away at his plausible deniability, and by the time a friendly man asks him in perfect RP English to turn off his phone he's just accepted that he's fucked.

"Ok," he says, staring down at the camera on the front of his phone. This is fine. He's an adult. He has gone... so much longer without talking to Hera. Many... many days longer. Great. "I'll... be back, I guess. See you on the flipside."

"You'll be fine, Doug," Hera tells him. He already knows it's a lie, but he appreciates the sentiment. He texts Hera a bunch of silly kissy face emojis and then he's alone with 150 other people for the next two hours. Yeah. This is sounding great.

Takeoff is pretty anti-climactic, given the whole. Spaceship. Thing. The plane bounces a bit, evens out, starts climbing higher. As they get further and further away from everybody Doug knows. It's fine. They plunge into a bank of clouds, all grey and soupy, obscuring his view out the window until there may as well be nothing out there and oh hey, apparently he's still having flashbacks actual years later. Neat!! EXCITING. He's wearing a Fitbit and the heartrate monitor is going INSANE and it's all very fun and cool and Jesus he hopes Hera wasn't getting that data.

Anyway. The flights happen. That's all that needs to be said about that. He makes it through customs and onto the shuttle bus and then he's standing in his hotel room staring down at his single suitcase sitting on the bedspread and his phone on the nightstand and he's been awake for almost 24 hours at this point. He really should sleep. Hera is telling him to sleep-- though she's graduated to a variety of emojis when she realized actually talking to him wasn't convincing him.

The hotel room is... very empty. He's been sharing sleeping space with at minimum one other person for the past 16 months. This is the first time since the Hephaestus that he's had a room that is entirely his own. It's really big. Really empty. He makes himself a coffee with the little complimentary pod machine (another thing that's different; the last hotel he stayed at they still had a normal coffeepot) just so that the counter looks slightly more like someone actually exists in the space.

The coffee wakes him up a little bit. He turns the TV on but everything is in English and it's surprisingly jarring. There's a safe in his room. He almost puts his passport in it, but then he realizes if somebody wanted to steal his passport that's the first place they'd look. He puts it into his backpack, but what if he loses the whole thing? Or the building starts on fire and he has to abandon his personal possessions? Without the passport he's literally trapped in this country. Stuck on one arbitrary chunk of land far away from his crew. And it's a lot harder to mount a daring rescue when you're constrained by things like money and boarders and laws. He never thought he'd be saying it, but some things were easier in space.

Eventually he leaves his passport in the back of the closet, tucked between the ironing board and the wall. He leaves his backup phone beside it so Hera can keep an eye on it while he's gone.

That takes up a whole 20 minutes. He turns off the TV, grabs his wallet and phone, and leaves the room. There's no way he's going to be able to sleep in there. At least not yet.

He winds up at Starbucks, because the cheap hotel coffee had helped, and if there's one benefit to being back on Earth (there are a lot of them, but he's feeling a little bitter) it's the availability of sweet creamy coffee whenever he wants it and is willing to pay an exorbitant price for it. All their money comes from Maxwell's adventures in cybercrime. He's willing to pay pretty much whenever.

He sits in Starbucks for three hours. It's weird being back in the States again. Everyone sounds vaguely familiar, and he's realizing that he honestly has no idea where Kate or Anne or his dad or every single employee of Goddard live. They could have all moved to California. They could want a coffee at any second. Ann wouldn't be old enough, yet. Hot chocolate, maybe, or one of those weird blended drinks that Maxwell likes and Dom pretends not to like.

He sends Hera a steady stream of text messages. He's having a great time! He's going to have pizza later, the good, American kind. 'Do you know how long it's been since I had pizza?'

He people watches until he catches himself searching for familiar faces and realizes his heart is going about three hundred beats per minute. He moves tables so his back is to a corner and so he's close enough to a power outlet to charge his phone. (Yes, Minkowski, he remembered to pack a converter.) Thinking of Minkowski makes him think about how far away Geneva is from San Diego on the map. Even if he gave up and decided he wanted to go home right now, it would still take him probably 24 hours to get there. Assuming nothing was delayed, and nobody got unexpectedly sick, and there were no flash floods or hurricanes or...

Doug leaves Starbucks and goes for a walk. It's disgustingly hot outside, and his t-shirt sticks uncomfortably to his back. The sun is too bright, so he buys giant dark sunglasses from a street vendor and takes approximately a hundred selfies that he sends to everybody. If they serve to hide most of his face and thus make him a tad less recognizable, well, that's just a side-benefit.

He does order pizza for dinner, but by the time he gets it back to his hotel room he's too sick with exhaustion and stress and caffeine to eat it. He shoves it in the tiny fridge and flops out, still dressed, on the bed. Hera tells him about what everyone back home is doing until he falls asleep.

The next day he takes himself and his badge and his phone to the back of the line to get into the main hall. He has the schedule pulled up on his phone, and he busies himself deciding exactly what he wants to do and mapping it all out in his head. It helps to ignore the hundreds of people around him, crushed in close and talking loudly to dispel the boredom of the line. He's in front of a family with two little kids, mom as Catwoman, dad as Batman, and twin girls as Joker and Poison Ivy, respectively. Behind him is a group of teenagers who spend a lot of time yelling to their friends further down the line and snapping pictures with their phones. As the line inches forward, Doug passes an old lady in an original Star Trek uniform, a cluster of guys in their early thirties talking loudly about 'content creation' and 'ad sales', a tall kid in a Captain America shirt who keeps glancing around uncertainly like they're scared someone is going to see them. And then there's a person in a space suit. It's a costume. Obviously. Doug has no idea who they're supposed to be. Their friend is all metallic silver plating and face paint, square boxy angles in the style of what everyone in the 1960s thought robots would look like. Doug can't stop staring at the space suit. Doug takes a series of deep breaths, because air is really great. The line moves forward and the space suit inches further and further behind him, a row ahead of him in line.

He gets inside just in time to wait in another line. He never used to mind crowds, but the swarms of people pressing in from all sides and continuing on in every direction are pretty overwhelming. He clenches his teeth, looks down at his schedule. He’s here to have a good time. He is going to have harmless fun with some fellow nerds.

The first item on his schedule is a panel about music in superhero movies. He waits in line for an hour to get in. He lasts ten minutes before he has to leave. They play something orchestral that rubs him the wrong way; it sounds kind of familiar. He hates it. He wants some fresh air and maybe a drink.

Ok. So. Maybe hold off on the panels for a while. He doesn't think anybody really noticed when he left but he really doesn't need to get a reputation as that weird guy who keeps running out of panels for no reason.

Ok. So. New plan. He wanders a bit and winds up in Artist Alley. He thinks maybe he should bring back gifts for everybody. That's a thing people do when they go on trips, right?

He starts at one end of the hall and starts working his way down. ...And keeps going. And going. What the hell do you get for the not-quite-family that has everything? Honestly, what do these people even like? He's lived with them for actual years, he should know this.

He can feel himself starting to freak out again, so he forces himself to stand still and take a deep breath. Start small. Minkowski likes musicals. Great! Does Comicon have anything about musicals? Are there CDs? Shirts?

Nothing on the tables in front of him is jumping out as particularly musical. He's about to pull out his phone to ask Hera, but hesitates. Part of him feels like asking Hera is cheating, but also he doesn't want to give people gifts they won't like. He decides he'll come back to the gift-giving idea. There's gotta be something here he wants for himself. Maybe he can decorate the walls of his and Hilbert's room. He'll need reading material for the plane ride home (he's going to be fine it's going to be fine it can't possibly be worse than the trip here).

He's actually on the verge of buying somebody's self-published graphic novel about technologically advanced sea creatures when somebody taps his shoulder.

Doug twitches, and starts to turn. The man's profile seems familiar, and he starts talking even before Doug has finished moving to look at him.

"Hi there, I'm really sorry to bother you, you look like you're focusing pretty hard there (I absolutely recommend this author, by the way, I bought her books last year and let me tell you, they were real page-turners), but anyway that's not the point. You look like somebody who's good with a camera. A real camera. Not one of those ridiculous little smart phones. And I absolutely have to get a picture with my new friend here, I'm sure you can tell why..."

He's not Mr. Cutter. Of course he's not Mr. Cutter. But the hair and the height and the colouring are all Mr. Cutter's, as is the overly-friendly sing-song in his delivery. Doug's stomach drops into his feet before he registers the unfamiliarity of the face. He's even wearing a sharp suit, perfectly creased pants and shiny shoes. Doug has no idea what he’s cosplaying, contrary to what not-Mr. Cutter seems to assume. He takes the giant bulky camera that's being shoved into his hands, even manages to force out a cheerful "Say cheese!" when the man and a woman in some sort of medieval armour throw their arms around each other's shoulders and grin into the camera flash. He gives back the camera, exchanges pleasantries. He buys the book. He pushes his way through the crowds and goes to throw up in a bathroom stall.

While he's hiding in his tiny cubical of privacy he texts Jacobi 'Hey out of curiosity do you know where Mr. C is hanging around these days?'

The response comes immediately and consists of three screens of ???!!!???!!!???!!!

'Thanks yr helpful,' he sends, and texts Hera the same question.

'I'll see what I can find out,' she tells him. He really loves Hera.

He also decides he's had enough fun for one day. The empty silence of the hotel room that had felt so lonely the first day sounds like a haven at this point. It takes a long time to get out of the hotel, especially because he's a little shaky and he occasionally has to take a minute to lean against walls or tables. Someone is dressed up as a frog. He never wants to interact with another human being again, but he forces himself to ask for a picture which he immediately Snapchats to Maxwell. He has priorities.

So anyway. That's Comicon. What a fantastic time.

***

So Eiffel flies halfway across the world to go stand in a lot of lineups, and Renée basically loses her shit. Just in a very contained Minkowski sort of way. Isabel and Dom have just handed over their entire case against Goddard to their legal team (it sounds more reassuring if she calls them a legal team) so they have lots of time to sit helplessly by and watch Renée getting more and more tense the longer Eiffel's gone.

The first day Isabel picks a couple fights with her to see if it will make her work out some tension, but then she inexplicably feels bad about it. Renée's phone is glued to her hand, the Twitter app open to the Comicon hashtag feed.

"I'm sure if anything catastrophic happens they'll show it on the news," Isabel points out.

"I'd rather get updates in realtime, thank you," Renée replies.

Hera says, "I'm in regular contact with Eiffel, Commander. And I've hacked in to the cameras in the hotel so I can keep an eye on him. I'm also running facial recognition on everyone attending the event in case there's anyone of interest who could pose a risk."

"He hasn't shown up in the background of anyone's photos," Renée says. "That can't be normal."

"It's a big event," Isabel says. "It's not actually that weird. Also, he promised to call every evening because hey, who needs sleep?"

"You say like you aren't awake anyway."

This is unfortunately true. Even without the seemingly endless task of assembling the case, Isabel still finds herself wide awake most of the night, only drifting off to sleep for a couple restless hours before she's up again. Renée refuses to go on morning runs with her, and nobody else is awake, so she runs alone through early morning twilight, silent streets and dewy grass the liminal spaces that separate one day from the next.

Renée says "Hera, are you checking the video streams of the panels? I'm not sure which ones he'd be interested in--"

"Yes," Hera says, like she's offended Renée had to ask. Isabel goes to pour herself a drink.

It was Thursday when Doug left. Saturday morning Renée is already up when Isabel gets back from her run, standing in the kitchen and staring down at her phone screen while the coffee press sits brewing beside her.

"Good morning," Isabel says.

"We need a waffle maker," Renée replies, and walks out of the kitchen, grabbing the keys to her stupid little smart car on the way past. Isabel shrugs, presses the plunger on the coffee, and goes to stare at the news on her tablet for a while. Having absolutely nothing to do is a goddamn thrill a minute.

Renée's back by the time Jacobi and Volodin straggle into the kitchen. She has obtained her waffle maker, and there is an entire carton of eggs awaiting their soft-boiled doom beside an alarmingly large pot. A tray of muffins has appeared, presumably from the oven, and there’re three packages of bacon sitting beside a platter of fresh fruit.

"Uhhhh," Jacobi says, taking a step back. Volodin nudges him forward, clearly more concerned with obtaining coffee than entertaining Renée's stress cooking or Jacobi's consternation.

"Sit down," Renée says.

"I'm... just gonna..." Jacobi starts to turn.

"Sit the fuck down, you coward," Isabel says. "We're all in this together."

"I hate you," Jacobi tells her, but he pulls out a chair.

Everybody watches Renée cook in bemused silence. She's set up a laptop on the counter and has the Comicon hashtag scrolling on one side and an Instagram feed on the other. If nothing else, this weekend is bringing Renée up-to-speed on social media platforms.

Eventually all breakfast foods are prepared to Renée's exacting standards and Isabel goes upstairs to gleefully roust Maxwell and Dom from their respective blanket cocoons-- she and a handful of ice cubes crawl into bed with Dom, and eventually she winds up dragging Maxwell and her blankets onto the floor. When she returns downstairs, Renée sends her a suspicious glance.

"There was a lot of screaming happening up there."

Isabel smiles angelically back at her. "They'll be right down."

Breakfast conversation revolves mostly around if it's weird that Doug hasn't sent them a bunch of photos, and also if it's statistically odd that he still hasn’t shown up in the background of anyone else's photos. Isabel mostly hides behind her waffles.

Isabel volunteers to do cleanup, which takes over an hour. She didn't even know they owned this many dishes, and she is reminded again, as she is every decade or so, that she still doesn't know what to do with bacon grease.

Once that's done, she showers, cleans the entire bathroom on a whim, and spends twenty minutes lying on the bed trying to focus on an episode of Batman: The Animated Series before giving up and going in search of someone to bother.

Dom is working at his real paying legal job, curled up with his laptop beside Renée on the sofa. Renée is obviously trying to read a book, but she keeps glancing down at her phone every thirty seconds.

"Come on," Isabel says. "Let's go for coffee."

"You just had coffee," Renée says without looking up. Isabel drapes herself over the back of the sofa and pokes the back of Dom's neck until he slides down to sit on the floor to get away from her.

"There's that new place, by the park," Isabel says. "You said you'd be interested in trying it out."

"I... did?" Renée doesn't sound convinced, which is... fair.

"You definitely did. Come on. It's the weekend. This is what people do on the weekends, right? Family outings. Expensive coffee."

"Oh my God please go," Dom says, staring desperately up at Renée. "Please. I love you both but you're really, really distracting and I can't think of the word that means retroactive but isn't retroactive."

They go to the coffeeshop. Isabel even lets Renée drive. She's generous like that. Also, Renée's commentary on her driving is harsh on a good day. Today she'd probably just throw Isabel out of the car. Probably while it was still moving.

They only last half an hour sitting at the coffee shop drinking sub-par coffee. Renée is snappish and Isabel is getting more and more jittery by the second and it's just not a good combination. They decide to go for a walk before heading home, which is when Isabel sees it.

"Renée," she says, cautiously. She's aware there's a chance that this will backfire, but it seems worth the risk to get Renée to let go of some of that tension and get her mind off of all the terrible things that are probably not happening to Eiffel.

Renée glances back at her. "Yes?"

Isabel points, silently, at the window of the pet store where a floppy-eared brown and white puppy is staring directly into her soul. "Do you want to pet some dogs?"

"Yes," Renée says, no hesitation, no pretence at disinterest or decorum.

They go inside. Isabel... well. She probably should have known better, looking back.

It's just the two of them. Nobody else to act as the voice of reason. At first Isabel thinks it's cute when Renée makes friends with one of the puppies. She takes a picture and sends it to Dom.

And then one of the petstore employees comes over and things start to slide out of her control. The employee starts talking about how these dogs really need homes, and how desperately the petstore wants everybody to rescue these poor tragic critters and anyone who doesn't take one home is a monster -- Ok, Isabel doesn't actually speak French but she can guess at the general gist of the conversation.

Renée is getting... a look. Renée, in fact, is getting the same look she got when they all stumbled off the remains of their deathtrap improvised shuttle, leaving Kepler in cryo behind them, with their only goal to get as far away as possible. Twelve hours later they'd stood around in a circle in a shitty pay-by-the-hour motel room somewhere in Germany, and just kind of stared uncertainly at each other. And Renée had gotten the look.

Isabel suddenly knows exactly where this is going. She immediately texts Dom: 'I hope you know what dogs eat; call me right now.'

Once it's been at least 30 seconds and Dom has yet to reply, Isabel just calls the house phone. She figures whoever might answer will be willing to support her in her common sense 'not getting a dog' plan.

It's Jacobi who answers.

"I need you to back me up, here," she says. "I'm going to send you a picture."

"Do we live in a democracy now?" he asks, mock-innocent. She ignores him and snaps a photo of Renée where she's on the ground with two puppies climbing all over her.

"You see the problem?" Isabel says as soon as she hears his phone chime on the other end of the line.

He's quiet for a minute, during which one of the puppies stands on its hind legs and licks Renée's nose. It would be more charming if Isabel didn't have the ominous feeling that it was going to become a very familiar sight.

Jacobi says, "I mean, I don't know how much help I'll be. I'm really shitty at naming things."

Isabel has to pull the phone away from her ear to stare, incredulous, at it for a few seconds. "That was not the correct answer," she says. "You're supposed to say 'Oh no, adding two puppies to the household on a spur of the moment decision is a terrible idea.'"

"...So you want me to lie?"

Isabel growls. "Daniel. I'm going to regret asking this. How many dogs did you have growing up?"

"Well, do you mean dogs that were specifically mine, or are we counting family pets, too?"

"I'm hanging up," Isabel says.

"Don't forget to ask if they have food allergies," he says, cheerfully. A cheerful Jacobi is a deeply unsettling thing. 

At first, Renée assures her that she's only going to get one. But then it turns out that the one has a sister, and "You don't expect me to break up a family, Isabel."

So they come home with two dogs.

"They're not even that big!" Jacobi assures her from where he's on his back in the grass of the back garden with a puppy on his chest. "If you put them together, they're just like having one very big dog, that comes in two smaller parts. For your convenience. Increased portability."

"Stop talking," Isabel says.

Dom is sitting on the back step with his forehead resting in his hand. Volodin is lurking just inside the door, trying not to look like he's interested. Renée stands up from where she's fixing a hole in the fence.

"Think of it this way, Isabel," she says. “They'll entertain each other, so they won't be nearly as destructive or energetic as they would be alone. Just like--" Isabel glares, and Renée trails off awkwardly in the most Eiffel-like display Isabel's ever seen. "Just like... uh... other dogs. That entertain each other."

Dom makes a pained noise. Renée glares at them both.

"Go get the dishes and food from inside," she tells Dom and Isabel.

As soon as they're in the house, Volodin skittering away as they enter, Dom says "I can't believe you let this happen."

"I didn't mean to!" Isabel objects. "I just thought it might make her less stressed to pet some dogs and then suddenly there was paperwork and leashes and I honestly thought I was having a really weird dream, did _you_ know Jacobi is a dog person?"

Dom sighs. "Well, she definitely seems less stressed, I'll give you that."

Isabel grins. "See? Mission accomplished." She holds up her hand for a high five. Dom reaches out and gently pushes it down. She sticks her tongue out at him.

Everything in the house revolves around the puppies for the rest of the weekend. Renée still checks up on Eiffel every five minutes, but she's far less intense about it, and she loses that pinched, helpless look that Isabel has only seen a few times-- usually when one or all of them were about to be killed.

When Eiffel gets back he looks exhausted. He doesn't even notice the puppies until the morning after his return when he comes bouncing out of his room looking refreshed and happy and promptly trips over one of them.

"Umm, guys?" he calls out. "Hera? Are we being invaded?"

"They aren't aliens," Hera says, which, ok, but is that really the first concern Eiffel jumps to?

"We had to get something to fill your place while you were gone," Maxwell says, passing him on her way up the stairs, clutching her coffee mug in one hand and her phone in the other.

"That's not true," Renée lies. Isabel whistles and the puppy turns away from Eiffel and trots down the stairs to her, almost over-balancing and somersaulting the last step. It stares up at her from its back, waving its front legs in the air.

"You're not cute," she tells it, but she's already bending down to rub its belly.

"Tell us about your trip," Renée says, waving Eiffel down the stairs.

"Oh, yeah, it was good," he says. "Do they have names yet?"

"Not yet. we're working on it. Did you meet any celebrities? Make any friends?”

"Wow, ok, mom," he says, rolling his eyes. "Didn't meet any celebs, all the lines were super long. So seriously, where did these little guys even come from?"

He's not great at deflecting, but Renée's also not great at pushing without it turning into an interrogation.

"You can't demand an AAR about his vacation," Isabel tells her, later. "I mean, you could, but I don't recommend it.”

"I’m just curious," Renée mutters. "And Hera won't tell me anything."

"Because Hera respects Doug's privacy," Hera cuts in, frostily.

Isabel holds up her hands. "I'm not getting involved."

Renée exhales heavily, shoulders slumping. "At some point they're going to move out," she says. "Obviously. Things won't stay this way forever."

Isabel doesn't know what to say. "Maybe just... don't think about that, for now," she offers.

Eiffel continues to be super dog-focused for the next week, joining Renée and Jacobi in attempting to teach the dogs basic obedience and pointless tricks, taking them to the park to make dog friends, and arguing over the best pet food brands. Isabel and Dom spend a lot of time playfully mocking them, and also having casual breakfast dates with their good pal who is totally not an Interpol agent, that would be ridiculous. Isabel also spends a lot of time doing nothing. She reads a lot of books. Goes for a lot of runs with Renée and the puppies (and no, she's totally not bitter that Renée will get up early to run with the puppies but not to run with Isabel).

She tries to teach herself to knit. Then she tries to teach herself to code. Then she decides maybe she needs to get out of the house more. There's an ancient tractor left by the previous inhabitant of the house, that's been rusting away in the falling-down shed nobody ever goes into. She drags it out into the alley behind the house and starts trying to repair it.

"Is this the low-budget version of the charming old car you learned to fix up with your dad?" Jacobi asks, hanging over the fence and staring flatly at her. She shoves at her hair where it's falling out of the elastic.

"My dad wasn't exactly mechanically inclined. And hey, if you know where you can just pick up a shitty old car that needs work without it becoming a huge production, you let me know."

“That sounds like a challenge."

"For fuck's sake."

Within a week there's an old red truck sitting where the tractor used to be. They never talk about it, but sometimes Jacobi wanders out to bring her a bottle of water or a puppy in need of cuddles or just to sit nearby while she works and he reads.

Eiffel never talks about his trip to her, but she almost walks in on he and Renée having a heart-to-heart in the kitchen, both of them looking a little teary-eyed, so she figures Renée's got that handled.

Naming the puppies is a goddamn production. It takes a month. Eiffel has a lot of strong opinions, most related to pop-culture.

"No, we're not naming them Luke and Leia," Renée sighs. "Or Beka and Rafe. Or Thor and Loki. Or Spock and Michael-- wait, am I missing something?"

All of Renée's suggestions are names from history books. Eiffel nixes all of them-- "I promise, anybody who isn't a social studies teacher is not going to have a clue who that is. Hey, maybe that should be your next career move! You'd be great at terrifying children."

Jacobi and Isabel don't even try to contribute names. Dom's are mostly literary, because no one in this household can apparently just be happy with Spot and Rover. Or Dan and Ann-- actually, no, Isabel finished that fucking book and continues to regret it thirty years later.

The arguments get ...really intense. There may be some yelling.

And then one-day Volodin makes some sort of ridiculous sciencey suggestion that Isabel can't even pronounce, and Eiffel snaps "If we're scraping the bottom of the barrel that much we may as well name them after the freaking plant monster!"

And Maxwell, who could not possibly care less about these fucking dogs, (her words, not Isabel's) says, "There we go! Great. Decided!"

And long story short that's why the puppies are named thirty and four.

The night after the official naming Jacobi wanders past while she's putting away the leftovers from dinner and pauses, loitering in the doorway. She keeps her back turned, pretending to rearrange something in the fridge while she waits for him to speak.

"So," he says, finally. "Uh. Maxwell's... Not having a great time? Lately?”

She closes the fridge, casual, turns so she's partially facing him, but not looking directly at him. She feels a little like the first time she'd been hiking and come across a deer, how she'd felt like she was being gifted with something incredibly breakable and rare, and aware that one wrong move could send the deer running away and a different wrong move could lead it to attack. ...She was a city kid, she had kind of assumed all wild animals were dangerous.

"I noticed," she says, lightly. "I wasn't sure if it was something we were acknowledging."

Jacobi huffs a brief laugh. "Yeah. Well. It might not be, but I figure... well. Just a fun little FYI."

"Thanks," she says. They stand in possibly the most awkward silence ever for a few decades and then Jacobi turns around and rushes away and Isabel lets out the breath she’d been holding.

She loiters over the last of the dishes, trying to decide what, if anything, she's supposed to do here. Handling Jacobi and Maxwell is worlds away from any of her previous command experience-- not that command experience is what she should be comparing it to. It's different than any of her previous friendships, too. There are a whole lot of things that they just don't need or want from her, and a few pretty specific things that they do. It's just a matter of figuring out what those things are. She's starting to realize that, while she may be able to nudge them in a certain direction, she is never going to have the sort of fine control over them professionally as Kepler did. Which is frankly more than fine with her. She doesn't have the specialized tactical knowledge to understand how to best deploy their skillsets, and she doesn't have the ruthlessness to use them to their full destructive potential. And they know it. The thing none of the Hephaestus crew had really understood at first was that Kepler had had to earn his team's respect, and had to continue earning it every single mission. Kepler may have a massive ego, but Maxwell and Jacobi aren't exactly modest in their areas of specialization either. Isabel is no intelligence Black Ops commander, and pretending like she could be is just going to lower their opinion of her.

That's not to say she doesn't fully intend to point them at Goddard and give the order should the court case fail, but she understands that once she's said "go" she will have no further input into how things are carried out. She's working on being ok with that. It's a process.

What they are lacking, in Kepler's absence, and what Isabel is 100% sure she is far better at than Kepler, is that same firm hand within a more personal context. Aspects of it bleed over into the professional, and will likely do so even more once they all actually move on beyond waiting for Goddard to fall. The whole thing is like nothing she's ever experienced, something for which she has no reference. Kepler had guided them by use of expectations. He hadn't particularly cared how they met those expectations, just that they did. It hadn't taken her long to realize that this left a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks. And it's Psych 101 that setting up immovable expectations or goals by which to judge someone just leads to an inability to handle failure. So she's a bit more hands-on than Kepler in some ways, a bit less in others. Continuously remaining worthy of their loyalty gives her someone to be accountable to, as well. Someone who isn't muddled with the entanglements of sex and romance. She wouldn't ask anything of Jacobi and Maxwell that she doesn't ask of herself.

By the time she goes upstairs and knocks on Maxwell and Jacobi's door she's no closer to figuring out what she's going to say. The door isn't shut, and swings open with her knock. Maxwell is sitting on the floor with her back against the mattress, headphones blaring something repetitive and, to Isabel's ears, tuneless. She has a tablet on her lap but she's not typing anything, just staring across the room at the window. Isabel moves slightly so her reflection is caught by the glass. Maxwell tugs off her headphones, turning around. It's all done easy and calm, like she's known Isabel was there the whole time, but Isabel knows her well enough that she can identify the tells of her surprise, the way her hand drops to the bedside table drawer, the slight jerk of her shoulders as she gasps silently.

"Hey," Isabel says. "Can I come in?"

Maxwell shrugs. Isabel waits.

"Yes, fine," Maxwell says, hunching a little defensively. That's one of the rules Isabel has made for herself. Unless someone is in immediate physical danger, she always waits for a clear sign of permission before she enters their private space. She pushes things a bit more in common spaces, makes a point of moving within their space, around them and behind them because she wants them to get accustomed to her presence on a subconscious level. There are things the body learns long before the mind catches up, and for as much as she is working not to be Kepler, she's still not always a good person. She doesn't think she has that kind of goodness in her anymore. Left it up in space with the bodies of her crew.

She goes in to the room and half closes the door behind her. Enough for privacy, but not enough to feel like a trap. She's not sure if Maxwell needs the assurance, but she sure as hell does.

"Soooo," Isabel says, sitting down on the floor beside Maxwell, a couple feet separating them. "How're you doing?"

Maxwell arches an eyebrow at her. Isabel, who had spent the entire year she was fifteen trying to learn how to raise one eyebrow, stares back.

"Is this because I'm not enthralled by the dogs?" she asks.

Isabel shakes her head. "It isn't because of anything in particular. I just figured, we haven't talked in a while."

"I wasn't aware we... talked, in the first place."

Isabel draws her legs up and wraps her arms around her knees loosely. "You've been kind of distant lately," she tries.

"I've been busy."

"With what? And that's a legitimate question, do you know how bored I am?"

"I've heard, yes."

"So? Tell me about what you're doing."

Maxwell glares, suddenly. "You wouldn't understand if I did. And you don't have to patronize me by pretending to care, I'm not a child.”

Isabel blinks a couple times. "Ooookay? That wasn't my intention. I'm honestly curious about what you've been up to."

"Mmhm. What, so you an go report back to Minkowski that I’m not getting into any trouble, playing well with others? Adjusting well to civilian life?”

Isabel drops her hands to her sides. "Ok, yeah, let's try this again and this time you can actually explain your thought process instead of lashing out with shit you know isn't true.”

"Don't tell me to calm down," Maxwell snaps. Isabel feels like she's about ten steps behind in this conversation. Maxwell seems pretty calm to her, honestly.

"What's going through your head right now?” she asks instead of replying. Maxwell's mind runs about twenty times faster than everybody else's, and sometimes she has a hard time putting concepts to words, or laying things out in a way that other people can follow. Jacobi can almost always figure out how she got from A to H, and Isabel can now usually manage A to D, but there are days where she can barely go from A to X without giving up in frustration over the limitations of verbal language. So instead of asking the impossible of her, Isabel just asks for a snapshot, whatever she can offer, so that Isabel can at least figure out what book they're in, if not what page.

"Adults always thought because I wasn't good at people it meant I didn't understand what they were doing. The psychiatrist, we went to the city once a month when I was ten, but it was worse at church group because the youth leaders pretended like they cared and then reported back to my father. Overwrite: to the Pastor. At least when we were all yelling it was real and nobody was pretending to be a happy family like on TV. I stayed in my room because I wasn't as good at pretending and I ruined the picture."

It's remarkably clear after a moment. Isabel suspects Maxwell has been thinking about this for quite a while and just needed an excuse to say it all.

"I don't think anyone is pretending," she says. "We're just trying to create something we enjoy."

"Daniel wants it," she says, like an accusation, and then, "I don't resent him for it, I know that's how it sounds but I don't. I'm glad, I just don't know how to follow him. It was the same with how much he loved Kepler."

"You're not going to lose him,” Isabel says, feeling like she is the wrong person to be having this conversation, like literally anyone would be better at this than she is.

"We were supposed to move on," Maxwell says. "We were never going to stay. There was always an afterward. But now things are changing."

Isabel chokes off a laugh. "Hey, if it helps, I'm pretty sure half of us are scared of the exact opposite. The idea of everyone moving terrifies me, and I don't think Eiffel and Minkowski are any better.” She hadn't realized how true it is until she said it. She still can't really envision a post-Goddard future.

"I'm better at being alone," Maxwell says. "I've always been alone and it was good that way. And then being with Daniel is like being alone because it's like he's a part of me. I don't know how to say that without using stupid clichés, let's just imagine that came out with 50% less flowery bullshit."

“Being part of a family doesn't mean you can't be alone sometimes, too," Isabel points out.

Maxwell waves a hand. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Family is a pretty strong word."

Isabel inclines her head. "Fair point. But I stand by what I meant. You've got Jacobi. You've got Hera. You've got me. It's not all Saturday breakfasts and movie nights. Is it being connected to people that brings up bad associations or just the traditional sort of signifiers that we usually take as shorthand for family?”

"I don't think I know the difference," Maxwell says, fast like she's embarrassed and trying not to show it. "Connection means pretending like the breakfasts and the road trips are things that make you happy. That's what family means."

"Ok," Isabel says. "So that's one branch. The pretending, the being alone, the yelling, those are all nodes, right? So you start working on new branches from the family and connection concepts. Jacobi's already an outlier, so you know in general what you're aiming for."

"That was almost cute," Maxwell says, shaking her head. Isabel huffs.

"Listen, I grew up on Word Perfect, ok, you're lucky I know how to change the configurations setting in Firefox, let alone any programming concepts."

Maxwell leans her head back on the mattress, rubbing at her eyes tiredly. "Two things," she says, hands still over her eyes. "1: I know you didn't actually tell me to calm down, but try not to use that sort of condescending bullshit if I’m freaking out. It does not help."

"Ok," Isabel says, simply.

"Two: if I'm going to do this... connection, people thing. I need you to-- Look. It's outside of my comfort zone. It's not a thing I'm good at, so you need to push me. And I don't think you're as ok with that sort of approach as you think you are, and I don't even know if I trust you to do it right but it's been over a year and at some point we've just got to dive in. To commit. The commitment's half of the solution you've been missing and at this point it's a waste of time for us to keep making you guess at what's missing."

"Yes," says Isabel. "I mean, I'll help you, and I’m committed to whatever this thing is with the three of us. I’m gonna need some time to think through all of us this, there are probably going to be some uncomfortable conversations for all of us in the near future, but my answer is absolutely yes."

Maxwell lowers her hands from her face, starts flicking at the tablet screen absently. "Ok. Well. Good talk, that's my yearly expenditure of emotion over with."

Isabel laughs. "Does this mean you'll come on the puppy playdates?” she asks innocently. Maxwell throws a pillow at her head.

"Bye, Lovelace."

Isabel leaves. Doug's door is closed, but the light is on in the third bedroom so she goes down the hall and knocks lightly.

"Everybody decent?"

"Come in and see," Renée calls back, and Isabel laughs, startled.

Renée and Dom are, in fact fully decent. They're also already in bed. ...as are the puppies.

"They're not sleeping here," Isabel says.

"You know, I said the same thing?" Dom mutters. "How do you think that worked out for me?”

"Like I said," Renée says. "You're both welcome to share the sofa.”

Isabel yanks off her hoodie and her jeans, leaving them and her bra in a pile on the floor. In t-shirt and underwear, she climbs over Dom, pushing a puppy gently out of the way until she's made a place for herself in the middle of the bed. Amused, Renée looks down at her, reaching over to brush hair out of her face.

"Hi there," Renée says.

"Hi," Isabel responds. "This is me, demanding physical affection."

"Oh, is that what this is?” Renée asks, grinning. "And here I thought it was an attempt to displace the puppies."

"I mean, that to," Isabel says. Dom rolls onto his side so he's facing her and she promptly squirms around until she's pressed up, her back against his chest, one ankle hooked over his. Renée slides down so she's lying down and Isabel drapes an arm over her back.

"You good?” Dom asks, quietly.

Isabel smiles, the vaguely alarmed circles her mind has been running in already settling down. "Yeah," she says. "This is good."

A puppy licks her nose.


End file.
